Saturday, September 1, 2012

Once there was a well-meaning, well-intentioned woman who had three children. She and her husband love these children and work as hard as they know how to give them food that they like, in-style clothing, a respectable looking home, and a car that doesn't have too much rust on it.

The children were all handsome and blessed with quick wit and an appreciation of a good prank. No doubt, characteristics inherited from both the mother and father, but more from the mother. The children made the parents as happy as parents could be and there was no end to the joy that they brought into the lives of the mother and father.

The father took pride in the outward assurances of all the good he had brought to his family; a comfortable home, a dinner table always full of more food than his children could eat, a wife who was able to be home for their children if they needed it.

But the well-meaning woman, who adores their children more than she could ever find the words to express, would ponder the doings of the day; did she provide them with the stuff of a happy memory? Would they look back on life with her and smile?

She thinks about their days together and there is so much that tells her how she misses the mark that the other women she knows always seem to hit.

There was the Monday last June when she was to pick up her youngest from an early release of a class, only to forget and have one of the on-the-mark parents call her at home, to tell her they had her child with them, wondering where she was.

While out shopping one day, she finds a jacket that makes her think of her oldest son. Excitedly, she buys it for him and leaves it hanging on the coat hook near the back door. He sees it when he comes home and asks her, "Whose is that?" When she tells him through grinning teeth that it's his, he responds, "No it's not."

Driving home from a store that is unfamiliar to her, she is caught in a roundabout intersection and loops through it only to find herself thrown back into the parking lot from where she first entered. It takes her teen-age son sitting next to her, who is one-month-old in driver's license years, to talk her through and out of the roundabout the second time.

Trying to encourage her happy-to-stay-home middle child to be with others, she promises him that if he arranges a bike ride with friends, she'll take care of his chores for the day. His green eyes look at hers and they strike a deal. He comes home late in the day, spent, to find that his bedsheets haven't been changed, nor his laundry folded and put away, because she just forgot.

But one evening, everything felt in place. The house was caught up and there was space to breathe before dinner. She pulled everything together for the day, miraculously somehow. More than anything that night, she wanted to squeeze in one of summer's last walks. The woman and her three sons left, planning to be home in time for her husband's arrival, when they would all eat together.

The four of them walk quickly, each boy trying to make her laugh the loudest as they take turns presenting their "walk of the day." She stays back a bit, watching her loves from behind and listening to their knock knock jokes - smiling to herself, finally feeling like one of the women who always hits the target. They return home and the first one to enter the house is the youngest. She smells the smoke as soon as he opens the door.

As they were weaving their way around the neighborhood - she, giddy from a day without failing - the potatoes that she had forgotten to take out of an oven that she had forgotten to turn off, were turning cajun blackened instead of fluffy baked, from their second hour in hell's fires. She shouts orders like a seasoned captain of a pirate ship, "Open the doors! Get the overhead fan going! Slide the patio door over!" and her children take to the commands as if they're running gunpowder to the cannons.

After she has all hands on deck, she sits at the kitchen island and tries to not cry. But the disappointment, again, of just not being able to be what she feels these beautiful children deserve, becomes too much for her to hold in.

"I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. I wish I was like the moms your friends all have. I'm so sorry."

All three of her princes surround her and promise that it doesn't matter, it's only potatoes.

Her littlest one pushes his way in under the arms of the two oldest brothers. "Naaah," he says, his little head resting against her shoulder, "I like it this way. It's more fun."

*I had coffee Friday with a wonderful local blogger I've come to know, Jen, of tranquilamama, and she loved this story that I told her, about my week. I decided to share it with all of you today, hoping that if there's a woman out there reading this who thinks she's missing the target, that she sees she's actually nailing it, right on the head.

53 comments:

You think you failed and the kids think you haven't. Mine's the opposite. I thought I did okay and mine (now adults) constantly find opportunities to tell me that I did everything wrong. You'd think I would have had a clue to that, along the way, but I sure didn't.

Dear Rach: we are better mothers than we think we are. We just have such impossibly perceived standards. I mean, we're assuming that the perfect mothers we watch with confused envy also have a household full of laughter?

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. We can only know what our children feel and how we make them feel.

LOVE the it's more fun statement. we have so many memories of me almost burning down the house and the german AND American firefighters coming to our house. it is way more interesting and exciting to be our children!!!!

This is so how I feel every day. You think that you are finally ahead of the game and then something happens to smack us in the face. I always feel like I am never doing enough or never doing the right things, but then I look at my happy kids and realize that we (moms) are all in the same boat. As long as our kids are happy and healthy we are doing something right.

I love how you told this story. I frequently apologize to my daughter for what I perceive as my failings and 9 times out of 10 she has no idea what I'm talking about, gives me a hug and says you're a good Mum.

I know when I compare someone's outsides by my insides the scales will never tip in my favor. But then again, I'm comparing apples to oranges. I think it's better to have my insides match my outside than to try to hide who I am.

You, my friend, are someone whose insides matches her outside, That makes you so much more approachable and easier spend time with (both on and off the net).

A wise older friend once said that if you get down on the floor and play with your kids, you're being a good mom. The rest is extra. She meant it literally and metaphorically, I think: being with your kids is way the hell more important that whether the potatoes are cooked perfectly. And besides, we all know that in point of fact you're a fantastic cook, so glitches for you are glitches, instead of what they are for me: standard operating procedure.

I remember my house not being kept up BUT I also remember throwing blankets over the kitchen table and "camping out' every time there was a rainstorm. We'd take flash lights and cover them with red and orange and yellow tissue paper and pretend it was a campfire.

I remember all that.

House still isn't cleaned, but the time for camping out inside, has long passed.

It is hard, Alexandra, so hard to remind myself that I am doing ok, I am doing enough, my kids are happy. I see so much failure when I look at my days, at the laundry I said I was going to finish but then fell asleep. Anger at the dishes I said I was going to wash but that now have lasagna stuck to them because I forgot...or fell asleep. But the times when, just like your boys, my kids lift me up and tell me something great I've done when I was totally oblivious to either doing it, doing it correctly, or them noticing at all? Damn. I just might be doing this motherhood thing justice. They just might wind up ok.

Wow, I love this post. The end really got me. Funny thing is, Alexandra, as I was catching up on your posts, reading from up to down, I found myself gulping, thinking, Alexandra always hits things on target. (I was reading today's post about the website you check out with your kids together, and I thought, I never do that!! When I am busy or out of commission or just plain lazy and tired I let my son play video games...alone) Thanks for your honesty. From time to time I have wished I could be a stay at home mom, thinking that in that way I would be there for my kid 100% and be an amazing mom, the type he will remember and love forever. But knowing me it is hardly any guarantee. But thank you for letting us know that no one ever hits the target all the time.

I'm late reading this one...but it is so so great. I love the ending - your youngest knowing that he is lucky to have you in his life. We worry so often about not measuring up - there is no endeavor laden with more pressure than parenting. Sometimes we have to look for those little signs that we are indeed measuring up, even in those moments we worry most that we are failing.